The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Auguries & Divinations by Heather Treseler

---

Egyptian Wing

Lost, in the museum, on Saturdays in the wine-dark
rooms of Egyptian tombs because my mother
had a disorder of the blood and no one
would tell me anything I could
believe of death—

her bed raised high as an ancient altar of stone
worn by a priest’s blade. There, she lay
cordoned off, beyond touch, like
a carved artifact the centuries
have filigreed with hairline

fissures of light. I was told to pray to the poor
man who hung, lashed to his lumber,
his ribs a staircase to a face of agony
strangely cleansed of terror: this
was no god to save a mother—

whereas the Egyptians had followed a creed
of birds. Even the tomb was called an egg.
And while “mummy” an accident
of sound, not sense, there was
tender swaddling

in death clothes, each body bathed in Nile salt
and stuffed with fragrant spices, organs
parsed in Canopic jars like the
grammar—subject, predicate—
of a sentence. To be sent

off, as if to summer camp, with pets, snacks,
and details for care and handling:
for that afterlife, I prayed
to falcon-headed Horus
and the winged soul

of the heart. Weren’t birds commuting
between a bitter earth and sky? Making
an eros of pitched precision?
Mothering a small body
toward its horizon.

---